Lost and Found

Rumours that Noonan

and I were buried

on Saipan or Tinian

That we were

spying for America

before Pearl Harbor

beheaded at

Garapan

by the Japanese

False rumours

urban legends

all

Noonan and I

just glided

from the sky

Out of fuel

we dropped

from the clouds

Past Howland

onto a Phoenix isle

in Kiribati

Nikumaroro

known then as

Gardner Island

My Lockheed

Electra

landed hard

On the atoll’s

sharp shallow

reef

I was 39

that day

2 July 1937

And I did so radio Itasca!

radioed Itasca

over and over!

They searched

every dot and cranny

for Noonan and me

Except for Gardner

the obvious spot

350 miles from Howland

The day we fell

2 July 1937

I was 39

Five eight tall

fair and freckled

gaptoothed

Small shoe

size 6

Cat’s Paw heel

The Press

called me

“Lady Lindy”

But they never

got the story

straight

Noonan and I died

marooned

needles in a haystack

And the story hung

by a thread

the thread just a leaf

overturned

in the island underbrush

by a hermit crab

revealing the

Cat’s Paw heel

of my shoe

I would have been lost

gone with the wind

forever

My poor bones

were sent to Fiji

(and “misplaced” there)

Sic transit

Gloria

Mundi

Sic transitted

my Lockheed

10 Electra

My DNA awaits

discovery

on Nikumaroro

Bits of the

Electra’s

undercarriage and

My heel

and smashed jar of Dr. Berry’s

Freckle Ointment too

I went

the way of all flesh

on 24 July 1937

My 40th birthday

no cake or candles

or balloons

But isn’t it swell?

Isn’t it neat?

This news

That the seekers

will find me this July!

Or maybe next year?

Poet Nan Socolow has been published in Rolling Stone, The New Republic and various Washingtonian magazines in the 1970s. Nan was Director of Development at Ford’s Theater in 1970s and worked for Princeton University (Administrator of Rockefeller College) and for the United States Department of State and USIA in Washington, DC, during the 1980s.

Nan has worked in Cayman Brac for Divi Tiara Beach Resort, Moses Kirkconnell, Tranquil Realty in the 1990s and lived in Cayman Brac for 25 years. Nan has had many poems, letters and comments published in the Caymanian Compass.

Lost And Found was written in memory of Amelia Earhart, who was born 24 July 1897, 115 years ago, and disappeared over the Pacific Ocean while on a around-the-world flight in her Lockheed 10 Electra on 2 July, 1937.

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